Anatomy of an Election Series: Technology

A review in The New Republic called it “a timely, rare, and valuable attempt to unveil the innovations revolutionizing campaign politics.” Journalist Sasha Issenberg spoke about his recently published bookThe Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns about how today’s campaigns are run by teams of technicians using statistics, behavioral psychology and data-mining to determine just how millions of Americans will vote. Issenberg’s lecture was the second installment in the “Anatomy of an Election” series.

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In the brave new world of Facebook, “smart phones” and Twitter, where both teens and adults would rather type than talk, are we more in touch but more isolated than ever before?Psychologist Sherry Turkle, who has researched technology’s effects on society for more than three decades, explores this seeming contradiction in her new book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, released earlier this year by Basic Books. She shared her insights in a talk in Gibson Center for the Arts.

Washington College was lucky to have two extraordinary political reporters, Matt Bai and Richard Cramer, kick off the lecture series “The Anatomy of an Election.” Bai and Cramer discussed the politics and campaign “strategies” of the election. Bai is a reporter and columnist for the New York Times Magazine and Cramer is the author of What It Takes: The Way to the White House.Watch video.

Introducing the C.V Starr Center’s new deputy director: Ted Maris-Wolf! Maris-Wolf’s talk about nearly three thousand enslaved Africans who were seized from slave ships by the U.S. Navy illuminates a crucial moment in history, when an otherwise indifferent president launched the nation’s strongest-ever attack on the international slave trade.

Maris-Wolf, who will join the Starr Center full-time in May, is currently Assistant Professor of History at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette. His work has focused on law, race, and the idea of freedom in 19th century America, as well as on runaway slave communities, the transatlantic slave trade, and the threads of history and memory that connect the United States with the Caribbean and West Africa.